SOME CHARACTERISTIC OLD BABYLONIAN
ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONSThe gagûmThe principle of partitive inheritance operating in Babylonia, brings about a frag-
mentation of the paternal estate. The patrilocal system allows the sons to manage the
paternal estate collectively, but, on the other hand, forces the daughters to take their
share into the family of their husbands as a dowry. A paterfamilias could reduce the
effects of this development by letting his daughter enter the gagûm, the ‘cloister’ of
Shamash, in Sippar as a nadı ̄tum, who was not allowed to marry. The numerous
archives of these ladies contain title deeds of house plots in the gagûm, fields and ‘ring
silver’, a means of payment reserved for the nadı ̄tumpriestess. Field leases constitute
the other major type of text in these archives.
The Codex Hammurabi (§ 178 ) states that the estate of these women, consisting
of the dowry which was bequeathed to them on their entering in the cloister, must
be managed by their father or their brother. This practice only rarely appears from
the legal documents since the nadı ̄tumacts as the nominal owner of her possessions.
Some inheritance documents specify that the brother is obliged to give rations to his
nadı ̄tumsister.
On the surface, the numerous adoption-support documents seem to imply that
these women were able to assign it to the heir of their choice. However, when we
are able to establish her family relations, it appears that the heir of a nadı ̄tumof
Shamash was very often the daughter of one of her brothers, who was also ordained
as a nadı ̄tumand that the dowry remained in the hands of the family in this way.
The role of entrepreneursAs illustrated in the above discussion of the temple management in Ur (the herding
contracts and the exploitation of the marshes) and the responsibilities of Shep-Sîn,
‘Overseer of the Merchants’ of Larsa, the ‘great organizations’ increasingly assigned
economic activities to private individuals as a kind of franchise in the course of the
Old Babylonian period (Renger 2000 ). This practice is traditionally labelled
‘Palastgeschäfte’ in Assyriological circles. Its purpose was to escape the costs of permanent
maintenance of the personnel, to transfer the economic risks onto the shoulders of
the ‘entrepreneur’ and to keep the administration of the whole organization relatively
simple by laying the responsibility of the whole scheme on a few managers, such as
the ‘Overseer of the Merchants’ in the case of fish and date retail.
Nearly all the aspects of the palace and temple economy would eventually be
managed through one or other variant of this principle, from agricultural production
and stock-breeding, to fishing and craftsmanship, tax-farming, the recruitment of
labourers and the retail sale of agricultural and other products. Freed from the
obligation to provide rations for its dependants, the palace was far more interested
in stocks of silver than in supplies of staple products.
The most extensive Old Babylonian documentation concerns the conversion of wool
staples (and, to a lesser degree, oxen and sesame) into silver. From the reign of Ammi-
saduqa, an archive concerning the responsibilities of Utul-Ishtar is preserved. Combined
— Anne Goddeeris —